Mayor of Moscow Yury Luzko has promised support for the manufacture of Elbrus International's microprocessor, the E2k, dubbed the "Merced killer". Luzkov visited Elbrus with the chiefs of the Russian academy of sciences, and the minister of science and technology of the Moscow government. At the meeting Luzkov, said the Moscow government will support the Elbrus project with product arriving possibly as early as next year. Elbrus claims that the E2k will exceed the speed of Merced by a factor of between three to five times, depending on the application, with half the die size of Merced. According to inventor Boris Babaian, the chip will have full compatibility with existing x86 software. Since 1985, scientists at Elbrus resisted complicated superscalar architecture for the benefit of the command system with direct parallelism at a level of processor instuctions using a principle known as Epic (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). Binary compilation used by the Elbrus developers is the basis for ensuring compatibility of the software written for other architectures, first of all x86 and IA-64. The fundamentals of the E2k design are protected by a plethora of international patents.The nucleus of the company is a set of professionals who have worked together for over 30 years and who created generations of Russian supercomputers for the Ministry of Defence. The history of Elbrus started in 1978, when the company was the first in the world to develop superscalar architecture, 15 years ahead of the West. ® Andy Fatkullin is an editor at Computerra, a Russian language online news service. See also Exclusive Russian chip scientist Babaian outlines Elbrus futures